For more on bisexuality, go to my main site at Bisexuality and beyond

Of course – I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before: bisexual videos on YouTube. I mean, everything else is there: high school productions of Carousel; salsa bands from the early 70s; women showing you how to put your hair up in a retro style (although I failed to follow her instructions properly and ended up with a frizz); the new make-up correspondent for the Guardian; and lectures on this, that and the other.

So, naturally enough, there’s bi stuff. There are 36 bi “manifestos” - this, for instance.....

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Then there’s “the bisexual kid” who has posted a whole series of videos (maybe dozens) about being a bisexual teenager. This one’s about coming out. I am a bit nervous for The Kid – he’s clearly very young, and thousands of people have seen his YouTube vids. This one has 533 comments. Still, what he is doing is, I’m sure, really valuable for isolated kids his age. I just hope the creeps/psychos/homophobes don’t track him down.
What do you think? Is he too young to be doing this? Brave, or foolhardy? I feel kind of uncomfortable when I see the still from his video posted below.

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At a rather different point in the age-range, a woman asked if she was “too old to come out at 46”. This seems to be a TV advice programme: Sound Advice with Marcia and Dr Rick.....

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Actually, I rather fancy doing a series of videos myself. We’ll see.

For more on bisexuality, go to my main blog at Bisexuality and beyond

On my main blog, I've downloaded some of those cute little flags which you click on and your blog gets translated into another language. Japanese, on my screen, just comes out as little rectangles, but Arabic seems all present and correct and Portuguese I can almost understand.

Any blogger who checks their site stats knows that many of their readers don't come from the country they live in themselves. Most, granted, probably come from the US wherever the writer comes from, but I would say – and I have before – that while 30-40% of readers come from North America, and about 15% from the UK, the rest come from absolutely anywhere. On earth, natch, although every now and then one of those no-fixed-abode satellite services makes me wonder.

So why oh why do so many US writers (bi ones included) write as if all their readers are coming from the US too. I find it tremendously off-putting. I mean, it's not "this political season" for me; I'm very unsure as to what a 401(k) is, and I certainly don't have one myself; and if a congressman has been misbehaving in a toilet (bathroom!) I have no idea what the specific ramifications might be. They write about a "we" that doesn't include the rest of the world and include stats that only apply to the US without specifying that it is just one country out of c163… It is OK to write about just the US – of course it is – but in fairness to your readers who aren't from there please make some reference to the fact that's what you're doing!

Anywhere and everywhere
Back to the "readers all over the world" tack… Of course, I am writing in this blog from the standpoint of a particular sort of conscious bisexuality. It's often assumed by those well-schooled in such matters that consciously being bisexual is something that only happens in specific parts of the Western world, and only happens now. People might have felt or behaved bisexuality across time and place, but they wouldn't have felt they were bisexual.

I think it's more complicated than that. I have written a fair few posts on bis in Times Gone By but there's clearly some kind of self-conscious bisexuality going on around the world too. Otherwise, why would people from, say, Singapore and Saudi Arabia be reading this blog.

Now, of course there are places across the world where sex is treated spectacularly differently than the West: Oman, for instance, where you need to be married to consent to sex; or all those countries where sex between men is illegal and subject to terrible punishments – even death. Not to mention the many many places where men have a degree of freedom undreamed of by women.

Different lives
There are many places where men and women's lives are so completely separate that I would have thought some form of bisex was probably inevitable. I organised a London bi conference in 1991 where a man from a North African country gave a talk about how prevalent sex between men was there. Someone asked him if women in his country had sex with each other, and he said no. The two Arabic women there rolled their eyes at each other. Well, I suppose that if the sexes were completely divided, then he wouldn't know, would he?

Given that everyone with an internet connection can be exposed – at least in theory - to all sorts of ideas from absolutely everywhere, there's no reason people from Romania shouldn't think about the sort of bisexual a New Yorker might be, or a Tanzanian read about what Sydney bisexuals are up to. And vice versa.

Geographical differences
Of course, there are still geographical differences. For instance, when I visited the Philippines (for work, not on holiday) a few years I was totally flummoxed by the number of open and not-passing male to female transsexuals who worked in the sexual health field, talking to born women about family planning and sexually transmitted infections. They seemed to be accepted as women, but as somehow wiser.

Alongside these people who were queer in a culturally specific way, there were also queers who had been more influenced by western ideas of being gay. So we also met gay men and (one) lesbian who saw themselves in that way. The gay men didn't like bisexuals: more exactly, their experience had been with those cheating married men who couldn't understand why any man would not want to have sex with women too and considered gay men as Not Real Men. Well, I don't like them either.

It did make me think, though, that the world is in a state of flux, with western and non-western ways of sexuality co-existing in interesting ways.

Anyway, now that I've done the flags, it's time to update my blogroll next… Getting on for half of those lovelies gave up the ghost yonks ago but you're still clicking on them! Time to give some new ones a chance.

And to see that, you'll have to go to my main site at Bisexuality and beyond

Time is running out for a bisexual woman who has been denied refugee status in Canada. Jane Okojie is scheduled to be deported to Nigeria on Thu, Jul 10 where she says she and her two children will face persecution because of her bisexuality.

"I don't know what to do," says Okojie. "I am more afraid for my children than for myself. There are so many things going on in my head, I cannot think properly."

"She's very scared," says Nastaran Roushan of the immigrant and refugee rights group No One Is Illegal, which is holding a rally in support of Okojie on Tue, Jul 8 at 11am in front of the offices of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (Toronto, 50 St Clair Ave E). "She fears for her life. If she goes back with her children, she has no one there. Her family has shunned her because she is bisexual. She doesn't have any money and nowhere to go. If she's arrested [her children] will be without a mother. They'll already face extreme discrimination because they were both born out of wedlock, and in fact, Samuel has already endured a lot of harassment while growing up there."

A victim of sexual violence and domestic abuse in her home country, Okojie says she fled Nigeria after being beaten by locals in her village and detained in prison after it was discovered she was bisexual.

"In Nigeria things are very bad for lesbians and gay people," says Okojie. "If you are a bisexual or lesbian or gay you can be stoned to death and you can be sentenced to prison for many many years. The government doesn't care."